“Yes, sir.” I turned to go and halfway to the door, I thought I heard him intoning hollowly: “And a child shall lead them.”
15. The Sphinx vs. Honeysuckle Epstein
IF ANY one man ever takes over the world again, he’ll be a camel driver. Camel drivers are cunning. They are the super race. It’s even conceivable that they are not human at all, but some alien intelligence from the distant stars.
His name was Ahmed and he was inscrutable. When Honeysuckle Epstein and I first saw him he had just finished neatly teleporting himself from the shadow of the Great Sphinx of Gizeh to a mound of Egyptian sand about six feet in front of us.
“My name Ahmed,” he said in a voice that was nighttime. His eyes were falling waters and the camel he rode had mange. “Marhaba!”
The microfilm-stuffed scarab was hanging from a gold chain around Honeysuckle’s florid neck. After three days of moosing around Egypt gathering “feature article material,” we had nosed into the designated curio shop, exchanged arcane passwords with the proprietor, and picked up the scarab without incident. Now, with three hours left before flight time and a return to Beirut, we were sightseeing at the pyramids, sand all around us, and the modern structures of Cairo rising in the distance.
“What is it?” whispered Honeysuckle, looking up at the mysterious creature before us.
“I don’t know,” I said. To our knowledge, no one had followed us from the curio shop. Now I wasn’t so sure.
“Byoot-i-ful scarab lady wear,” said the rider, and although I coughed blood, Honeysuckle seemed unaware. What would James Mason do in this situation? I wondered.
“Y’all sellin’ filthy pictchuhs?” declared Honeysuckle.
“Noh noh noh noh noh!” smiled the man who called himself Ahmed, raising his right hand, “Noh! Noh pitchur!”
“No?” said Epstein.
“Noh.” His right hand was now resting over his heart. “Camel ride. You like camel ride?” He was still looking at Honeysuckle. Honeysuckle looked at the camel. “Huh-uh.”
“Very good camel.” He patted its neck and I had a sudden vision of one of the forty thieves patting the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Honeysuckle, meanwhile, poked one foot around in the sand, not looking up.
“Only sixty piastres.”
Epstein squinted her eyes and looked off at the late afternoon sun, hands on her hips. “How,” she asked me in a whisper, “do yuh say ‘Get off my back’ in Arabic?”
“Hil onni,” I whispered back, my suspicions and anxieties mounting.
Epstein turned her gaze from the sun and looked up at the sly dusk that was Ahmed, declaring loudly: “Hil anni!”
“Hil on-ni!” parried Ahmed, correcting Epstein’s pronunciation, and if he were an agent, there would be no escaping him!
“You like picture?” The Arab held aloft a superannuated heap of camera much like those lugged wearily around Central Park by little old men in faded pin-stripe suits.
“Got my own,” said Honeysuckle, tapping a brittle fingernail against the Retina slung over her ample shoulder. “But wait just a second, yuh hear?”
She turned to me. “Think he’d let me use that godawful lookin’ creature he’s ridin’ foh a pictchuh prop?” Honeysuckle was hot for the color slide.
“Ask him,” I said, nervously, annoyed that she didn’t share my terror.
“You ask him,” she said. “On accounta you bein’ a A-rab maybe he’ll unduhstand yuh-all bettuh. An’ a Yankee besides,” she added gratuitously.
I asked him. And by way of answer, Ahmed leaped gracefully from his barnacled old ship of the desert and offered it to Honeysuckle Epstein with a magnificent billowing sweep of his white-swathed arm. His performance was smoother than a Damascus blade going through Unguentine.
“Me and the camel and the Sphinx,” instructed Honeysuckle, putting the camera into my hands. “See if yuh-all can get us in the same shot.” Then she sand-blasted her way to the camel and posed uncertainly alongside its comic horror of a head. She didn’t exactly look dedicated.
I nervously tried lining them up in the viewfinder—Honeysuckle, the camel, and the Sphinx. Ahmed stood by, quiet as goosegrease and watchful as radar.
I fumbled with the unfamiliar levers of the camera for a few moments, and then, just as I had zeroed down the focus, a soft voice nudged my ear. “Ya m’allem—o learned one!” I turned to look at Ahmed. “Would not be better,” he suggested smoothoy, “if Madame perhaps move back little bit? Then more camel in picture, noh?” Was there a death ray in the camel’s rump? Or an alarm system sensitive to microfilm?
“Well—maybe,” I said. I apprehensively passed the word along to Honeysuckle and she stepped back with a will. I figured she’d been thinking all the time about what she’d heard about camels and their habits of oral hygiene. Now she stood back with an uneasy hand against the camel’s flank, an awkward picture of sunburned relief.
As two camels, two Sphinxes and two Honeysuckle Epsteins melted into one in the camera’s split-image viewfinder, Ahmed’s low tones arrested me once again. “Perhaps, yaa mallem, better if camel lie down. Then see Sphinx better, noh?” I looked him in the eye. But I didn’t dare behave too suspiciously. “Okay,” I said. Ahmed gave the word, and the camel eventually rubberized itself onto the desert floor, and I fell to one knee to get the Epstein-Sphinx-camel trio from a new angle. “Cain’t yuh-all hurry it up some?” pleaded Honeysuckle, and it was at precisely this moment that Ahmed chose to address her directly in a voice that had suddenly picked up unusual qualities of volume and distinctness. “You like, you get on camel!” he intoned.
And suddenly everything flipped from 331⁄3 to 78 RPM’s. Honeysuckle gingerly straddled the camel, and through the viewfinder, in a sort of 35-millimeter nightmare, I saw the beast lurch, lumber up quickly, and flounder off at top speed in the direction of the Great Pyramid!
Honeysuckle’s screams grew fainter with the distance, and by the time she had reached the pyramid, Ahmed’s plan seemed clear: his henchmen were concealed in its shadow, and they would grab Honeysuckle and the scarab!
But no. She passed the pyramid, headed out a way toward the Temple of the Bulls, and then gradually veered in toward home plate. Ahmed had made no menacing move, and as she lumbered past the Sphinx, I depressed the shutter release button on the camera. I knew Honeysuckle would be pleased.
But by the time she got back she didn’t seem pleased at all. Half jumping, half tumbling out of the saddle, “Damn!” she wheezed.
“Sixty piastres,” said Ahmed.
“What?”
“Sixty piastres. For camel ride.”
Honeysuckle sputtered unintelligibly, and incredibly relieved, I picked over Ahmed’s leathery, mustached face to see if I could detect there some tell-tale trace of amusement, mockery, or guilt. I couldn’t. He was inscrutable.
I cut short the sightseeing and rushed Honeysuckle out to Cairo Airport. “You flight cancel!” said the airport ticket agent. “Cancel?” I gurgled, for I was still seeing intelligence men in the bushes, daggers in their teeth. “Cancel,” repeated the agent.
“Why?”
“I do not know.”
“What have you got going out now?”
“To Beirut?”
“Anywhere!” I choked.
“Plane in ten minutes to Jidda,” he said. “Saudi Arabia.”
“We’ll take it!”
It seemed like a pretty good idea to get the hell out of there.
16. Allah Is Their Copilot!
“GOOD ARABIC coffee,” said the old shiek, bending over his bronze coffee maker, “must be brought to a boil three times. Ah! The flame grows weak—more kerosene! Four boilings is Euphrates mud,” he went on, “and two is thin-bearded ruin. Ah! The flame grows bright!”
It grew bright, all right, but before it could grow much brighter, the sensitive-nosed American pilot of our aircraft rushed down from the flight deck, fire extinguisher in hand, and doused the blaze on the cabin floor. Honeysuckle Epst
ein and I stared at each other in terror. We were heading home from Egypt aboard Saudi Arabian Airlines and were experiencing scarabosis plus a thousand and one nightmares!
The pilot stood staring down at the sheik sitting in the aisle. “Aah,” sighed the latter as he brooded ruefully over the sullen froth in his coffee maker. “Thin-bearded ruin.”
The pilot, a lanky, bronzed Texan, turned and winked at us, as though this were not an uncommon experience, and then squirmed his way through the mass of humanity spilling over from the seats into the aisles. The plane was packed with a load of hajaj making their pilgrimage to Mecca. Many of the passengers had brought along sheep and goats which, like their masters, had not bathed in several decades. “Phew!” said Honeysuckle Epstein. “Ech!” said I. We were both right.
Surrounding us was madness at twelve thousand feet. Sheep were bleating and defecating, passengers were gibbering and munching on evil-smelling foods of their own making, and a persistent goat was earnestly charging and butting his own reflection in the polished surface of the door to the pilot’s compartment.
“Gonna take a picture of this?” I remarked to Honeysuckle.
“Hush yuh mouth,” she snapped. “Ah’m sick.”
She was not alone. In a private section, to the rear of the aircraft, was a pudgy Saudi prince returning to his severe homeland after some gay nights in Cairo, and I could see that he was exceeding green in the face as he suddenly came past us, squirming and lurching through the aisle while the common folk made way for him. Nobody paid too much attention when he stumbled over to the DC-3’s emergency door. But he got all kinds of attention when he tried to open it. “Where,” said the Saudi Arabian steward who had suddenly materialized, “do you think you’re going, Your Eminence.”
“Out of my way,” said the prince. “I’m getting off.”
“But you can’t get off.”
“I’m a prince! Don’t tell me!”
“But we haven’t landed yet! You’ll die!”
“You’ll die, you impudent guardian of a winged camel! Open, I say!”
The American pilot, roused by the commotion, came pouring out of the door and was immediately butted by the goat, who was at that instant in mid-charge. Howling and clutching one hand to his shin, the pilot managed to edge past the goat, who seemed equally stunned by what had transpired, and made his way quickly to the prince. “What’s going on?” he demanded in pidgin Arabic.
“I want to get off!” roared the prince. “Idiots! Can’t you see I’m sick!”
“I see,” said the pilot, and he and the steward overpowered him and led him back to his seat, where they gave him sick cups and sympathy.
A little later, the Texan left the prince under the steward’s watchful eye and squirmed back toward the pilot’s cabin.
“This happen often?” I called out to him as he got abreast of our seats.
“Ah, shoot,” he drawled, “that ain’t the half of it.”
ii
Glad for other Americans to talk to, he lingered a while and gave us the other “half.”
The main hazard of flying for Saudi Arabian Airlines, he related, lay in the fact that while the chief pilots were all Americans, the copilots had to be Saudi Arabians. And the Saudis, while a likable lot, were uniformly undependable in a crisis. Once, he related by way of illustration, he was nosing one of the King’s Convairs toward Jidda with a full load of Mecca pilgrims when a violent desert storm whirled and whipped the craft around in its drafts. As the storm grew wilder, the copilot’s face grew whiter. Suddenly he lurched out of his seat and onto his knees, and was about to touch his head to the floor in the Moslem attitude of prayer when, typically uncertain of his position, he quavered: “Which way to Mecca?”
“Thataway,” the Texan had drawled, and “Shukran,” responded the copilot gratefully, touching his head to the floor in the direction of Mecca. He looked up only once during the remainder of the storm to say worriedly: “Let me know, Captain, if you should change course.”
Once, another pilot, a Missourian, was heading a cargo-carrying Bristol toward Dhahran at fourteen thousand feet when both he and the copilot were suddenly overcome by a numbing dizziness.
The pilot torpidly set the craft on automatic pilot and clambered down the ladder to the cargo area. There he found lethal carbon monoxide pouring from a big white Cadillac’s exhaust pipes. The car was one of the King’s.
The pilot weakly tapped at the car window, the Texan recounted, and the grinning Saudi driver inside rolled it down.
“What,” the pilot had gasped, “are you doing? Your motor’s running!”
“I know,” said the Saudi blandly. “It was cold. I thought I’d run the heater.”
There was even more to the story of Saudi Arabian Airlines, and Honeysuckle Epstein and I gulped it down incredulously. About once every two months, for instance, a Bedouin lunatic was shipped off to Beirut for hospitalization, and the airport manager seldom bothered to so notify the pilot. Like the time a huge, hot-eyed desert Arab suddenly appeared in mid-flight at the door to the pilot’s compartment and intoned sonorously in Arabic: “Fly as high as you like—you will not escape. Orders are orders, and I am the King’s man.”
“What do you want?” the surprised copilot had asked.
“I am the Royal Executioner!”
It had wound up with the steward, the pilot and the copilot carrying on a battle royal in an attempt to subdue the madman, while the plane lurched along crazily on automatic pilot with goats and Bedouins scattering willy-nilly.
“Why didn’t you tell me there was going to be an unattended crackpot on board?” the pilot of that aircraft had demanded of the airport manager afterward.
“Well, he seemed perfectly normal when they brought him in here,” the Saudi had replied haughtily. “I didn’t see why I should disturb you.”
The disturbances all started, our Texan explained, when President Roosevelt met King Ibn Saud in 1945 aboard a U.S. Navy ship in the Red Sea. FDR presented the old Saudi monarch with a token of his esteem: a DC-3. And that was the beginning of Saudi Arabian Airlines and some nervous service for a handful of Yankee pilots.
“It’s got its compensations,” drawled the Texan. “Saudis are a pretty happy people and they’re generous. When we’ve got one of the royal family aboard like that prince there, we usually get a tip like maybe five hundred dollars, or maybe a half dozen gold wrist watches. Even the gals in the harem give us gold sovereigns.”
“Is it worth it?” I asked him, looking at the chaos about me.
“Oh, we get along on old yimken airlines,” he smiled.
“What does yimken mean?” asked Honeysuckle Epstein after he had left.
“Maybe,” I answered.
“Maybe what?” she said.
“Just maybe.”
Honeysuckle looked out the window and placed an edgy hand on the scarab and another over her safety belt. She maintained this basic posture all the way to Jidda.
iii
As we taxied to a halt on the Jidda runway, I looked through a window and saw soldiers rushing toward the plane. “The scarab?” whimpered Honeysuckle in alarm. “The prince,” I said. “That’ll be a military guard of honor.” And it was. The soldiers, bayonet-tipped rifles resting on their shoulders, lined up under the aircraft. It was an inspiring sight. As the prince stepped out of the aircraft, someone shouted “Present arms!” and twenty bayonets, gleaming in the sun, snapped up and slashed hell out of the wings with pinpoint, military precision!
We made immediate connections to Beirut where I was greeted by a satisfied “harrumph” from the Ambassador and two letters which expressed wondrous little satisfaction about anything. The first was from Mama, who had apparently seen my picture in the Post, along with that explosive article about my bilingual eavesdropping. But as usual, Mama saw only what she wanted to see:
Will-yam, my Baybee Jesus:
Warr you tink? I see pitchair you bruddair Mike in Satarday Even Pasta. What i
l hell he doin dair? Dos racketeer, dey maik some mungey bizness. I tell data dopey Etmekdjian to write lerra to da FBI an he say he donno da adress. Listen, Will-yam, you write for me da lerra. Fin out who make datta pitchair from Mike in da Pasta! Mabbe da racketeer dey give him dope when he not lookin den dey taik da pitchair. Maabe datta Sol Capone, he do it. Dos Joosh people dey got lotta gangstir.
I fix datta Sol Capone. I break his neck.
You Mama
Pssst: How da shildren? Don let nawborry taik dair pitchair. Watch out, Will-yam, somborry put needle in you arm!
The second letter was from Gunther Festoon. And even compared to my mother’s, it was a pure gas.
17. What Do You Do for Kicks?
AFTER SUCCESSFULLY leading Honeysuckle Epstein out of bondage in Egypt, I was dashed to find that Gunther Festoon was dissatisfied with the lack of sex in my reports. His waiting memo read as follows:
MEMORANDUM
FROM:
Gunther Festoon, USIA I/R, Washington
TO:
William Peter Blatty, AmEmbassy, Beirut
SUBJECT:
Reports
Blatty! Your reports have been—interesting, son, interesting. And I’m pleased to note an increased objectivity. Which is good. You’re not tensing any more. Which was bad. But aren’t there some rather significant facets of the Arab social complex that we’re overlooking? I mean, didn’t we discuss the desirability of reporting on every aspect of Arab mores that might radically differ from our own, including, to take a remote but striking example, unusual Sex practices? Didn’t we? I certainly don’t mean to harp on sex practices, and I repeat, I merely use this by way of example. However, should you happen to come across anything of this nature, do, of course, write it up. Let’s not fail to see the forest for the trees, eh?
Incidentally—did that building actually move?
(signed) FESTOON
I was no longer too sure about the building, but I was certainly moved. That eccentric old gorgon, Festoon, was lusting after an Arab version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in memorandum form, and this I was unable to produce. To my knowledge, the beatnik movement had not yet spread to the Arab World, and if there were any hairy sex practices going on among the Lebanese, they certainly weren’t making up any jokes about them. I was clearly in non sexis extremis.